MP grills officials over cancelled vaccine facility

OTTAWA — NDP health critic Judy Wasylycia-Leis this morning accused officials from the Public Health Agency of Canada of lying about the reasons Canada cancelled plans to build a pilot-scale HIV-vaccine manufacturing plant.

The officials, including assistant deputy minister Rainer Engelhardt and Steven Sternthal, director of the Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative Secretariat, appeared at a House of Commons health committee meeting to explain what happened. They repeated previous assertions by the agency and government that the facility was shelved because none of the applicants met the criteria to build it and a new study emerged suggesting such a facility was no longer needed.

"It was not an easy decision," Engelhardt said. "It was based solely on scientific and technical considerations."

But Wasylycia-Leis told the two officials while their responses were similar to what they told her in February, they contradicted earlier testimony to the health committee by PHAC head Dr. David Butler-Jones.

"I didn't believe you then and I don't believe you now," Wasylycia-Leis said.

Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq's spokeswoman said the government remains committed to the fight against HIV and AIDS and is working with the Gates Foundation to determine the best use for the money that would have gone to the vaccine facility.

"It's unfortunate opposition members are refusing to take the truth for an answer and are questioning the credibility of public health officials," said Josee Bellemare in an email.

Among the contradictions Wasylycia-Leis cited was a statement by Sternthal that none of the four finalists were ranked in order of worthiness by an independent scientific peer review committee. Butler-Jones told the committee a few weeks ago they were given a rank order.

She also said Butler-Jones pointed mainly to the financial sustainability of the proposals as the failure, while Engelhardt said the problems with the bids were scientific and technical in nature.

She said she thinks they are trying to deliver government-issued talking points and are being tripped up by a "tangled web of deceit and obfuscation."

Wasylycia-Leis said she believes the decision was entirely political for four potential reasons including "petty politics" because of the Liberal candidacy of Terry Duguid. Until August 2009, Duguid was the CEO of Winnipeg-based International Centre for Infectious Diseases, the company believed to be the leading candidate to build the facility.

She also suggested it could be regional politics because the ICID bid was competing against a bid from Quebec, "big pharma" politics because partners in the ICID were generic drug manufacturers, and "ideological politics" because of AIDS.

Three HIV research experts also appeared at the committee and all three expressed complete disbelief the project had been cancelled. Dr. Bill Cameron, head of the Canadian Association for HIV Research, global vaccine expert Dr. Don Gerson and Dr. Rafick-Pierre Sekaly, co-director of the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute in Florida, all said none of the reasons given by the government for cancelling the project are justified.

Cameron said possibly the government decided to change its policy towards HIV vaccine development but he said when he was first told the facility was being cancelled, he didn't believe it was truly because none of the bids met the criteria or a sudden discovery of existing plants capable of producing vaccines.

"When I hear that kind of argument it makes me think that there is probably something else as well that's unspoken," he said. "I wouldn't call that deceit. Maybe there was a policy change somewhere that has happened in the five years or more of the program and this proposal is no longer favoured."

The federal government first began exploring options to build a facility to produce HIV vaccines for clinical trials in 2003, when the former Liberal government was in power. However, the Canadian HIV Vaccine Initiative partnership with the Gates Foundation was not announced until 2007, by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The vaccine facility was supposed to be the centrepiece of the CHVI, and was to cost $88 million of the $139 million commitment to CHVI by Ottawa and the Gates Foundation.

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca